That last phrase carries more weight than it might first appear. To say a building cannot be dated is not a failure of record-keeping so much as an acknowledgement that Slievemore resists easy categorisation. The mountain's southern flank is home to the Slievemore Deserted Village, one of the largest and most evocative collections of pre-Famine and Famine-era stone cottages in Ireland, their roofless walls still standing in long parallel rows above the Atlantic. Whether this particular structure belongs to that settlement, predates it, or sits apart from it entirely is not currently known.

Slievemore has been inhabited, in various forms and at various removes, for thousands of years. The area around the mountain contains megalithic tombs, a substantial souterrain (an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge), and the traces of field systems that speak to repeated cycles of habitation and abandonment long before the catastrophe of the 1840s. The Deserted Village itself was used seasonally well into the twentieth century as a booley settlement, where farming families moved their cattle to upland grazing for the summer months, a practice known in Irish as buailteachas. A house that cannot be assigned a date on Slievemore might belong to any one of these layers, or to more than one simultaneously, its stones reused and its function shifted across generations in ways that leave no clear signature for later surveyors to read.

The honest answer, for now, is that this particular structure remains an open question on a mountain full of them.